blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes/archive/2007/09/25/why-grandpa-talks-like-chris-rock-in-nc-17-mode.aspx
March 2007 Why Grandpa Says Inappropriate Things Tuesday, September 25, 2007 3:38 PM By Sharon Begley The elderly man had just sat down in the pew. Folding up his walker, he watched his home health-care aide push his wife's wheelchair down the hallway toward the ladies room, then turned to me (I was serving as an usher at this service). But, figuring there was no point in saying anything, I just nodded politely and put the man's language down to his age, to being raised in an era when "colored" was acceptable. Studies since the late 1990s have shown that older Americans tend to be more racist than younger people. That has been explained by the Social Security generation growing up, and having its social and political attitudes formed, in a period when racism and ethnic prejudice were not as unacceptable as they became in, say, the 1960s.
By "we," I mean our frontal cortex, the site in the brain that acts to inhibit unwanted thoughts and behaviors. Older adults might be "more prejudiced than younger adults because they can no longer inhibit their unintentionally activated stereotypes." The loss of inhibition is the result of the brain's traitorous tendency to shrink as we age. The result is educed ability to inhibit irrelevant or unwanted thoughts. This loss of inhibition might explain other behaviors that crop up in many elderly, including "social inappropriateness." To test whether loss of inhibition might explain racism and stereotyping, von Hippel first gave volunteers paragraphs containing distracting text and asked them to read the paragraphs aloud without speaking the distracting text. The differences in stereotyping and prejudice, the researchers found, reflected age differences in inhibitory control. That is, older adults used stereotypes and displayed prejudice only "to the degree that they also showed greater difficulty inhibiting their vocalization of the distracting text," find the scientists. Adults with inhibitory control (and frontal lobes) intact, as measured by their ability to ignore the distracting text, did not display as much prejudice toward African Americans. Although older adults try to inhibit their racist feelings, their brain isn't up to it. This lack of inhibition is probably also behind grandpa's habit of asking you, loudly and in public, how your bowel movements have been or, at your wedding, how you're doing in the wake of being dumped by your last girlfriend. As von Hippel delicately puts it, "older adults are more likely than younger adults to talk excessively and about topics that are irrelevant to the stream of conversation .
That is, they know what's acceptable conversation, but their frontal lobes can't stifle their impulses--impulses younger adults have, too, but manage to squelch. Is there any hope for my elderly congregant and his "colored" vocabulary? To the contrary: aerobic exercise enhances their functioning among older adults. Next time grandpa utters something out of "Birth of a Nation," suggest mall walking.
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